The Count of Eleven (15 page)

“You’re making my brain fuzzy,” Laura complained.

“Don’t you like playing with numbers?”

“Sometimes.”

They’re what life is made of. Without them we’d never understand the world.”

“And the Quails aren’t the only ones who are interested, Laura,” Julia reminded her. The young couple who came yesterday who are getting married said they were.”

The week brought Jack several replies to his job applications, two of them inviting him to be interviewed. One job was in Wales, the more attractive was in Ellesmere Port, too distant for any rumours of arson to spoil his chances but less than half an hour’s drive along the motorway. The interview was scheduled for early next week, before he and Andy would have finished decorating. If he drove the van to the interview Andy was bound to be puzzled, but Andy saved the day by clearing out the Datsun. “It’s like you said,” he told Jack, ‘you can get into the habit of thinking how you are is how you have to be.”

This was on Monday, and he seemed restored by a day off. The car had just pulled into the cracked weedy drive when Mrs. Merrybale emerged from the porch, her arthritis making her sway like a sailor. “You won’t want this tea. I’ll make some new,” she said, and pitched away into the house.

She was wearing a long black dress down which her grey hair trailed lower than her prominent shoulder-blades. “Going out dancing tonight, Mrs. M?” Andy suggested as he and Jack bore hefty cans of paint into the hall.

“He’s a comedian, isn’t he?” she said for at least the twelfth time to Jack, sucking in her lips so that her grin wouldn’t expose her false teeth. When she returned to the kitchen Jack murmured to Andy “I don’t know if I should mention this, but it’s witches who go dancing on May Eve.”

“Hit me on the head and call me Peg. You don’t think she thought I meant that, do you?”

“I don’t think anyone could think you’re capable of malice.”

“Same goes for you, old pip.”

Jack didn’t quite know how to respond to this, but was saved from trying by Mrs. Merrybale, who seemed bent on racing Andy to the top of the house so that he would have old towels on which to stand the cans of paint. Today they were to paint the wall above the stairs. On Saturday they’d finished halfway up the wall on the middle landing. Jack was working upwards while Andy tackled the most difficult stretch, the wall below the skylight over the stairwell, by perching on a fully extended aluminium ladder propped on the top landing. Whenever Mrs. Merrybale approached the stairs Jack heard the ladder rattle. “Don’t let her rattle you,

Andy,” he said under his breath.

Once she had brought them elevenses, currant buns and china chattering on a tray awash with tea, she kept trudging halfway up the stairs to see if she could retrieve the tray and then hurrying apologetically down again. Jack handed it and its cargo of remains to her as soon as he decently could, and saw Andy closing his eyes at the top of the ladder as she set foot on the stairs again. “That makes me think of a parrot,” she said.

“Oh,” Andy said helplessly.

“Ah,”said Jack.

She was gazing at the tea-cosy which she’d left on the post at the foot of the stairs. “Just say if you’re busy,” she said.

Andy gripped the ladder with one hand and rubbed his forehead with the other. “Not too busy to listen. We couldn’t ever be that.”

“Exactly what I was telling myself. There’s nothing like a chat to keep us going.” She was silent except for a wheeze at each stair until she reached Jack. “What was I saying? Oh, the parrot; I was saying that the cosy made me think of it. I expect you’ll be wondering why.”

“Yes,” Andy said in a tone of pure anguish.

“It was the old man, you see. Brought him home from Africa because he thought I’d like some company. Sat on that post where the cosy is and never said a word.”

“The parrot did, not your husband,” Jack said.

“He’s a laugh, isn’t he, Mr. Jack, Mr. Andy, I mean?” she called to Andy, who groaned. “It was the bird sitting there right enough, not the old man. Sat there whenever I let him out of his cage, till I just left him there most of the time. Looked as if someone had carved him on the post and painted him, he did. Now you’d think he’d be no use there, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you think he wouldn’t be any use?”

Andy nodded so vigorously that the ladder shifted. “Well, you’d be wrong,” she said triumphantly. “He was better than a dog, that bird. I found that out the day someone broke into the house.”

The two men waited while she halted two stairs short of the landing above which Andy was perched and turned towards Jack. “Well, I’ve held you up enough. I’ll get out of your way,” she said, and started down.

Andy emitted a strangled noise, just short of a recognisable word, and she swung round. Are you all right, Mr. Jack, that’s to say Mr. Andy?” she asked him.

Jack himself was trying to decide whether the intruder had fled in terror when the carving on the banisters had come to life, or it had found its voice at last and convinced the burglar he was caught, or it had been able to imitate his speech with an accuracy which had led the police to him. He was about to ask Mrs. Merrybale and put Andy out of his misery when she lost her footing on the edge of a tread.

She didn’t fall far. She grabbed the banister with both hands and landed on the next stair down with a thud which jarred her legs and made her wince. Her heels had dragged the carpet away from the stair above her. As she either lost her footing again or sat down to recover from the shock, her heels tugged at the carpet and she slid down one more step. The carpet began to snap free of all the treads above her, a process which would end where Andy’s ladder was propped. “Is she hurt, Jack?” Andy shouted.

In an instant Jack was no longer the audience for a slapstick routine in which nobody would be injured but an onlooker at an accident which he was powerless to prevent: if he tried to reach Andy his weight would dislodge the carpet further. “She’s he said wildly, and saw Mrs. Merrybale slide down another stair and clutch at the banister, saw the carpet rise up taut from the top stair. “Step down,” he cried.

Mrs. Merrybale thought he meant her. She hauled herself to her feet and let herself down one more stair. “You’ll Jack shouted and saw that she hadn’t shifted the carpet any further. At that moment Andy, who was descending the ladder, caught sight of the disaster advancing towards him. He was perhaps twelve rungs up the ladder, and clattering down at speed, when the top of the ladder began to screech across the wall towards the stairwell, and he jumped.

The ladder fell one way, Andy the other. The ladder tipped over the banister, clanged against the edge of the next landing and thudded into the hall, where it teetered upside down before falling over. Andy fell on his feet, bending his knees to lessen the impact, and immediately went sprawling as the carpet slithered from beneath him. He sat down hard and stayed there, looking shaken and irate. As he fell Mrs. Merrybale had emitted a shriek which no parrot would have been ashamed of, and now she began to climb towards him, kicking the carpet into place. Are you all right, Mr. Jamister Andy? Can I do anything for you?”

Andy nodded and stretched out his hands. “What about the parrot?”

“Why, he died years ago,” she said, and stared at Andy as he threw himself onto his back and lay hooting and pummelling the floor. “Some tea, that’s what you need. I’ll be seeing to a pot,” she said, retreating.

When Andy had recovered from his outburst he and Jack secured the carpet and carried the ladder upstairs. Andy was game to climb it again, but Jack insisted on taking his place; that was the least he could do after having put Andy at risk. Still, he’d learned not to take his luck for granted, not to squander it when he himself was able to improve a situation. He was glad to finish painting the ceiling around the skylight leaning back made him feel as though the ladder was about to sway over the stairwell. “It’s a good job you were only eleven rungs up when it went,” he told Andy.

At the end of the day less than a day’s worth of decorating remained. Andy suggested that he could cope by himself, but Jack wouldn’t hear of it; he would still be in plenty of time for the library interview. In the morning he donned his old clothes which smelled faintly of paint and sat at the breakfast table, counting silently in elevens, until Andy honked the horn outside. “Wish me no, don’t wish me luck,” he told Julia and Laura. “Keep it for yourselves.”

It was some weeks later when Laura cycled down to the stretch of promenade that faced the bay. Heavy evening sunlight lazed on a mercury sea. All along the promenade cars were saying L to one another. She sat on a bench and watched the learner drivers braving roundabouts, attempting three-point turns which often gained extra points, flashing both direction indicators as if they didn’t know which way to turn, screeching to a halt in the face of invisible obstacles. A rusty Skoda came to a juddering stop a few yards from her, and an enraged couple changed places in the front seats before the woman put her foot down and the car roared off. When its oily fumes trailed towards her, Laura cycled once around the roundabouts and made for home.

She was passing the International Experience where the colours of the lit sign, which were faded by the sky, put her in mind of sweets when she met Jackie Pether. Jackie and another girl were sitting on the chained-up swings in the little fairground and sharing a cigarette, which might have been why Jackie went on the offensive at once. She folded her arms as if to show she couldn’t have touched the cigarette, and smirked. “No you haven’t,” she said.

Her friend giggled, though she clearly had no more idea of what Jackie meant than Laura had. “Who says?” Laura demanded.

“Everyone who knows you, Laura Orchard.”

“Well, that doesn’t include you, Jackie Pether, so don’t you go letting your friend think it does.”

“People know more about you than you’d like them to know,” Jackie said.

The sight of Jackie’s friend’s broad dull face growing smug infuriated Laura as Jackie meant to do. “You don’t know anything worth knowing, Jackie Pether.”

“I know that’s a lie, for a start,” Jackie said and pointed at Laura’s budding breasts.

So that had been her original theme: Laura’s T-shirt which announced I’VE BEEN TO KNOSSOS. “It was a present Jody brought me. Anyway, you don’t know I’m not going.”

“I know you won’t be when your dad can’t get a job.”

The girl with the cigarette spluttered as though Jackie had confounded Laura with her wit, and then she started coughing. By the time the girl had regained control of herself Laura had discarded the retort she’d first thought of in favour of something she wanted to know. “Was it you who went about saying my dad meant to set fire to his shop, Jackie Pether?”

“Lots of people did.”

“Like your mum and dad, for instance?”

Jackie opened her mouth and then turned mute and furious. “My dad could sue them for losing him that job at school,” Laura said. “Your dad’s supposed to be a policeman. If my dad took him to court he’d have to tell the truth.”

“Don’t you say things about my dad,” Jackie shrilled. “Yours is mad, everyone says so. He runs round New Brighton with one shoe on.”

Laura felt her face grow hot. “I’ll tell you one thing, he doesn’t spread lies about people. And I’ll tell you another, he’s just got a better job than the one at school.”

“Where, in a nuthouse?”

“In Ellesmere Port library, if you must know,” Laura said, and cycled away without looking back.

If she had lingered it might have seemed that she was trying to convince them. Her father had heard only this week that he’d been chosen for the job. It didn’t matter whether Jackie and her friend believed it but yes, it did. They had spoiled Laura’s evening, and she didn’t want to go home while it might be apparent to her parents that something had.

She cycled past the bowling alley, past Adventureland where people on machines were screaming, past the bollards which barred cars from the rest of the promenade. She rode so fast that all she could hear was the wind. By the time she slowed she was halfway to Seacombe Ferry, on a stretch of promenade with nothing but a half-mile curve of high brick wall for company. She sat on a solitary bench and watched windows light up like sparks in the ashen blur of streets across the river.

If her father had really been seen wearing only one shoe he must have meant it as a joke. He was worth a dozen dads like Jackie’s, who never seemed to smile unless the joke was at someone else’s expense. He would be starting work in Ellesmere Port next week, and then if Jackie Pether said he hadn’t she would just be making herself look foolish. Laura let these thoughts establish themselves in her mind until she felt it was time to go home.

She was no longer alone on the stretch of promenade. A thin boy whose scalp looked encrusted with sand had climbed the nearest set of steps from the beach and was leaning against the railings opposite the corner of the wall which cut off the view of this stretch from the route back to New Brighton. His spine was propped against the highest rail, one foot resting on the lowest. As Laura mounted her bicycle and pedalled towards him he pushed himself away from the railing, his boot striking the pavement loudly and metallically as a horseshoe. “That’s like my cousin’s bike,” he said.

He was several years older than Laura. He stepped off the pavement into the road, lowering his head as though displaying the sandy stubble which didn’t quite hide raw patches of his scalp. She gave him a polite smile, but his lips -the only part of his mottled face which seemed to have much flesh beneath the skin twitched like a dog’s as he sidled into her path. “I said that looks like my fucking cousin’s bike.”

“Well, it isn’t. My parents bought it for me for Christmas.”

“You pair-rents? What’s a pair-rent?” He was advancing on her, kicking his feet outwards as though he was dancing. “Looks like her fucking pair-rents gave her our Germaine’s bike that someone stole,” he said.

Laura glanced back, so hastily that pain stabbed the side of her neck. Two more boys had come up the steps from the beach, quietly despite their boots. One looked older and stupider than the boy in front of Laura, and bore half a dozen blackened scabs under his greyish chin, while the youngest was about Laura’s age and seemed to have thought of a joke he was bursting to share. All three had versions of the same flat face which looked as though it had been thumped into shape. As the newcomers moved towards Laura she swung the front wheel and trod hard on the higher pedal. The bicycle veered around her interrogator, but he danced backwards and seized the handlebars. “Where you fucking off to? Where’s your fucking manners?”